Grayson Brothers Series Boxed Set (4 books in 1) (89 page)

Saturday evening Faith stood outside the bathhouse door, listening to Claire Grayson and her friend Anna Levens laugh uproariously as they frolicked in the tub with three other women. The three lived with Anna in a home Claire and Boyd Grayson provided to women who were desperate for a refuge from heavy-handed husbands. Claire said she and Anna had opened the home five years ago after Anna’s husband Larry Levens was sent to prison for murdering two men.

Faith didn’t have to ask if Anna had been one of those beaten women. If the scar on Anna’s shoulder wasn’t proof enough, the wariness in her eyes was. The woman was petite and pretty, and so sweet Faith couldn’t imagine any man wanting to hurt her. But apparently her husband had beaten her unmercifully and even threatened to kill her. Thank God the beast was in prison.

The bruises on the other women who were staying with Anna broke Faith’s heart. The bath had brought the ladies so much pleasure, Faith had invited them back for a second complimentary treatment.

The Grayson women had done such an amazing job of promoting her business, the female residents of Fredonia swarmed into Faith’s greenhouse. Some came to buy herbs and salves and teas, but she suspected most of them came to get a look at Iris. The more adventurous ladies accepted their complimentary bath and massage. Afterward, they raved with such enthusiasm, the customers poured through the door faster than Faith could service them. She and her aunts worked from morning to night, and still they had to ask several ladies to return the following week.

Dr. Milton and the apothecary owner, Wayne Archer, had stopped in to caution Faith about giving the ladies harmful treatments and selling toxic herbs. Faith had listened politely, but Aster and Dahlia marched the snobbish men right out the door in front of several customers. Faith had feared the women would follow the men out, but they’d only laughed and applauded.

Several other men had stopped in during the week, pretending to want herbs or flowers, but they never left without stating their desire to court Faith or one of her aunts. Dahlia refused all offers without considering them. Iris flirted and left the men guessing. Aster and Tansy said they were too busy now and asked the men to stop back in a month or so. It was a relief for Faith to tell the men that she had accepted the sheriff’s suit. He hadn’t returned from his trip to Mayville, but Faith thought about him constantly, about his shoulder, about his kisses. Every minute she wasn’t working or thinking about work, she would think about Duke and wonder if he would kiss her again.

She carved out time to take her meals with Cora and Adam, and to read with them at bedtime. But each night she had fallen asleep beside them, exhausted, with a few pennies added to her money jar.

Tonight, though, she was so fatigued she could barely manage to massage oil into the ladies’ backs. When she finished, Claire and her friends gave her a warm hug before leaving the greenhouse.

“Go on in,” Aster said. “We’ll clean up and be in shortly”

“Bless you, Aster.” Faith pumped the faucet handle, washed her hands, and dried them on her apron as she hurried to the house where Cora and Adam lay on their pallets reading.

Thank goodness tomorrow was Sunday. Fully dressed, she flopped down between them and gave them both a hug. “I love you two. Thank you for being so helpful this week.”

Cora hooked her arms around Faith’s neck and plastered her cheek with an exuberant kiss. “I miss you, Mama.”

She kissed Cora then leaned to kiss Adam.

Braced on his elbows, Adam ducked his head and focused on his book.

His avoidance made Faith’s heart bleed. She hadn’t even had time to ask him about his first week in school. She tweaked his side. “Does that look mean you’re getting too old for my hugs and kisses?”

He lifted his head, leaned over and pecked her on the cheek. “You look awful.”

“Thank you,” she said with laugh. “I feel awful.”

“Want me to tell you a story tonight?” Cora offered.

“That would be wonderful, sweetheart.” Faith’s eyes were so blurred from fatigue, she doubted she’d be able to read a single sentence.

Cora sat up and studiously placed the book they were reading in her lap, as if she were going to read it. Faith stretched out on her stomach between them and warned herself not to fall asleep.

“Once upon a time there was a girl who was so small she could dance on the top of a thimble,” Cora said, imitating Dahlia’s best storytelling voice.

Faith grinned into the pillow.

“The little girl was beautiful, and she was the best dancer in the whole world. But she was very, very sad,” Cora went on, lowering her voice to sound ominous.

“Why was she sad?” Faith asked.

“Because she didn’t have a daddy.”

A spear of pain shot through Faith’s chest. Cora had started asking why she didn’t have a daddy, but Faith had been skirting the question because she honestly didn’t know how to answer. She knew how painful it was to wonder about a father who was absent, but Cora would never understand the truth. And Faith would never tell her.

“One day,” Cora continued, “the little girl caught a beautiful pony, and when he let her ride on his back, she went looking for her daddy...”

Two strong hands settled on Faith’s shoulders, startling her from her somber thoughts. She peeked up to see Adam sitting beside her, his long fingers gently kneading her tense shoulder muscles. For all his acting tough and disinterested in her affection, Adam was a tender, thoughtful boy who needed her love as desperately as she needed his. The two of them had spent years together living with fear and loneliness, having only each other for company during those long evenings and miserable nights while their mother worked the brothel. They’d cried together and laughed together. And Faith had mothered Adam from the day of his birth. He was her brother by blood, her son by possession, and she loved him as fiercely as she loved Cora.

“Adam, that is absolute heaven.”

Cora paused. “Do you want me to rub your back too?” she asked, her desire to please shining in her eyes.

“No, sweetheart. I want to hear about the tiny girl and her pony. What did she name her pony?”

“Dandelion.”

“That’s not a pony name,” Adam said.

“It is too,” Cora insisted. “Her pony has white fluffy spots on him that look like dandelion puffs.”

Adam’s laugh cracked into a falsetto, which set them all off, and Faith basked in their shared moment of happiness. They’d been so heartbroken over her mother’s death, and so panic- stricken afterward in their rush to escape Judge Stone, they hadn’t shared a family moment like this in nearly two months. Cora hadn’t noticed the upheaval so much, but Adam bore the weight of needing to be a man while still a boy. Faith lifted her hand and stroked her fingers over Adam’s bony knuckles. He paused, a question in his eyes. Her own misted, and she gave him a smile that said she loved him. The needy boy in him returned her smile.

Adam’s tender consideration and Cora’s sweet little voice warmed Faith, and she closed her eyes to savor the moment.

She woke at dawn the next morning, still dressed and aching in every muscle.

Cora and Adam were burrowed in their blankets, but they had lain a blanket over her. They took care of her that way. But they shouldn’t have to. Knowing she’d fallen asleep on them made her eyes flood with tears.

The cavernous building was silent as Faith pulled the blanket off and laid it over Adam, who’d sacrificed it to keep her warm. Her aunts slept a few feet away on their own pallets, looking as exhausted as she felt.

Faith quietly left the pallet she shared with Cora then gathered clean clothes and slipped out to the greenhouse. In the bathhouse she lit a lantern, lowered the wick, and shed her dress and petticoats. Shivering in the predawn coolness, she scrubbed herself clean, rinsed then draped a towel on the edge of the steaming tub.  Sighing, she lowered her body into the soothing hot water. How could the sheriff not like the water this warm? It felt divine to her, and it was her only comfort.

Tugging the metal stool beneath her, she leaned back and rested her head on the rolled-up towel. No matter what happened, she wasn’t leaving the bath for at least an hour.

The soft airy hiss of the gas burner beneath the tub was her only company. An occasional drop of condensation fell from the cold iron faucet into the water with a quiet blip. The light scent of lavender, chamomile, and almond oil wafted from the bath. Goosebumps speckled her flesh, and her nipples puckered in the steamy air. She shivered with a soul-deep loneliness she’d felt since childhood.

From the age of five, she’d spent most of her time alone with her books in a one-room shack behind the brothel. As she grew older, she’d played in the greenhouse surrounded by plants that became her only friends.

At two o’clock each day, Faith and her mother and aunts had shared their main meal in the brothel kitchen—the only room Faith was allowed to enter in the big house until she started giving massages. Faith loved that hour of laughter and attention, and the two hours afterward when she and her mother would go to the greenhouse to tend her mother’s roses.

But when the clock struck five, Faith’s happiness changed to dread. Her mother would fix a sandwich for Faith’s supper and see her safely back inside their shack. Before going to work, she would remind Faith about the bell hanging from a string in the corner of the room that she was to ring only in an emergency. The rope ran between the brothel and the shack with a bell at each end, and her mother used it to check on her. She would tug her end, making the bell at Faith’s end ring. Faith would tug back to ring that she was fine. But if Faith rang the bell without her mother’s prompting, it meant she had an emergency.

She was five years old the first time her mother left her alone during the evening. Faith rang the bell because she was lonely and frightened. Her mother raced into the shack with two of her aunts, fearing that one of the male customers had strayed out back. When her mother realized there was no emergency, she grew furious and slapped Faith. Then she broke into tears and sank to her knees, rocking her child in her arms and promising they would have a real home someday with a big porch and lots of roses.

It was winter, and her mother tucked a blanket around Faith then stoked the stove before going back to the brothel to continue an endless night of work. Faith huddled alone on her pallet in the silent room, nibbling her sandwich, her hand clinging to the bellrope, desperate to pull it, knowing she didn’t dare.

She’d been twelve when Adam was born, and she learned how to care for an infant. Her mother made frequent visits to the shack to feed him, but seemed unable to give him anything more than her mother’s milk. So Faith had been the one to give Adam the love he needed. The two of them clung to each other, spending years alone in that shack, day after day, night after night, waiting like prisoners for their mother to come and dole out their daily sustenance.

Her mother had wanted to protect them from the ugliness of her life, but in doing so she’d kept herself away from them, depriving them of her mothering and love, and imprisoning them in a world they didn’t understand.

And that’s why Faith hated her. She could bear her mother’s neglect. But Adam and Faith had needed the woman in their lives more than three hours a day. Was it too much to ask for a mother’s love? For a little of her attention and time?

That would have been enough for Faith. That’s all she herself had wanted from her mother.

And that’s what Adam and Cora needed from Faith. But her debts and expenses were pulling her away, stealing her time and forcing her to make choices as destructive as her mother’s had been. Faith couldn’t bear another day of seeing Adam and Cora’s desperate faces as she dragged herself inside and fell asleep without tucking them in.

She needed help.

She needed love.

She buried her face in her hands, lost and alone as she’d been all her life. Her anguished sob echoed off the stones, and she couldn’t hold back the deep sorrow wrenching her heart. She wept for her mother and her aunts who’d been stripped of their innocence and driven into a soulless life of prostitution; and for Adam and Cora, two beautiful children who were deserving of a better life than they’d been given; and for herself, because she was paying for the sins of her mother. And because she was repeating them.

* * *

Duke rushed to the bathhouse with his revolver gripped in his hand and his heart pounding. Faith stood in the huge tub, her face in her hands, her glistening body convulsing with hard, wrenching sobs.

He looked around the small stone room and saw nothing wrong, no fire, no man lurking in the shadows, just Faith alone and weeping. The greenhouse was empty and silent. The only sound was her broken sobs, which he’d heard on his approach.

“Faith?”

She sucked in a breath and whirled toward the door, her face soaked with tears and misery, her breasts peeping through her wet hair.

“Are you all right?” he asked.

She blinked in shock. A second later, she shrieked and sank into the water. “What are you doing here?”

He holstered his gun. “I thought you had a fire in here.”

“What?”

“I just got into town and saw a glow through one of your windows while I was heading home. I thought the gas burner had started a fire, or that somebody was snooping around in your greenhouse.”

“It’s five-thirty in the morning.”

“Which is exactly why I was suspicious.”

She snatched the towel off the ledge and dragged it beneath the water. “It’s just me and my lantern, so you can leave.”

He gave her a consoling look. “Nobody with a heart could witness those wracking sobs and walk away.”

She turned her back and lowered her chin. “I’m fine,” she said, but her voice came out in a shaky whisper.

“You’re not fine.”

She swiped her fingers beneath her eyes, telling him she was struggling to hide more tears. The lantern cast a golden glow across her wet skin and the rippling water that blessedly hid her body from him. After glimpsing her breasts, he was relieved he couldn’t see into the water. She needed comfort now, not a sexual proposition. And that’s what he’d want to give her if she unveiled the rest of her beautiful body. He wasn’t a cad, just a man who was fiercely attracted to her.